>Richard has gone to the movies tonight with our friend Pam. They’re seeing “Tristram Shandy.” I stayed home and watched a rerun of “Will and Grace,” the one about the hydro-bra. I’m interested in how children’s book people negotiate differences in taste–not just with their loved ones, but with their colleagues and with the young […]

>People in Oklahoma must have awfully short memories, as demonstrated by the following usage of the word emergency: AS INTRODUCED An Act relating to libraries; providing for withholding of certain state funds under certain circumstances; providing for codification; and declaring an emergency. BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA: SECTION 1. […]

>To borrow a word from one of our reviewers, I am faced this week with a veritable panoply of book reviews to edit. As is increasingly usual, there is a lot of high-stakes fantasy, a genre that seems to grow ever more political in its themes (or maybe it’s just the fantasies we choose to […]

>Although it’s going to take me forever to get through the academic prose of James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard, 2006), it has some heady arguments that I’m enjoying engagement with. One of English’s key points, for example, is that “modern cultural prizes cannot fulfill […]

>”Where am I? is the first demand the wailing infant makes of the world he arrives in. Calmed and comforted, you stop asking after a while, and are soon so adjusted to reality (an adult invention) that you forget the question.” –Peter Conrad, Behind the Mountain: Return to Tasmania (Poseidon Press, 1989)

>I’m happy to see that the students in Utah have dodged a bullet–you know, as I typed those words the potential bad taste of the cliche started to worry me, what with our concern for Safe Schools and all, but then I realized that kids are far more likely to suffer educational damage from their […]